July 10: Field school I

09-July-06 Coleman State Park

It's sticky but not too hot. We are camping in Coleman State Park, which seems like a very long 25 minutes away from the dig site. The tents are pitched in a very open area (I found a bush to huddle next to) and there are other people camped much too close. On the positive side, the state park aspect also means that there are superior showers & even a laundry room. And a pay phone. This is particularly important since the dial-up Internet service Dick is trying to use is very, very slow. And no one's cell phone seems to work.


View from the cabin toward the shower and so forth building

There are 5 recent college graduates in anthropology here, wondering whether they would like to do archaeology as a career, and there are three people in their 50's or 40's who have never dug before. A few experienced people, whom I am very fond of are also here: Mikey's sister Karen and her friend Mimi, and Linda the Hardware Princess.

We are having the usual opening chat. Dick has told the story of the site, a big sloping meadow overlooking the Connecticut River in a rather small town. Edna, now the associate state archaeologist, found it back in 1994, when she was a contract archaeologist working on putting through a pipeline (which does a cute little curl around the site). She had a hankering to put an extra pit into her sampling sequence just along an a little rise near the Connecticut River and bang! Hundreds of black chert thinning and sharpening flakes, and something like six channel flakes, the kind that come off when you flute the point. The area was subdivided for development, but the owners are now interested in seeing whether the site is worth listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The field school has been going for two weeks, with some rain-outs the first week and lots of sun since then. Dick says that so far the finds have been thin, but they have stuff from Paleo (including a black chert scraper), and Archaic (quartz flakes) periods, and maybe something Woodland.

The local birds so far include wood thrush, ovenbird, chipping sparrows and white-throated sparrows. Rumors of a bald eagle at the lakeshore, complaints of owls and loons.

July 10th: Early Monday: The mosquitoes seem to be more active in the morning than they were last night. And no-see-ums, maybe 1.5 mm long by none wide. They bite. But nothing seems to have got into my tent and I slept well. There is also definitely a loon or two. I'd never heard one doing the howling at night thing before.



The loons are associated with a lake. There are small Japanese-style mountains on the far side, blackflies and trout fishermen and blue flag iris on this side. Hummingbirds check you out.

The cabin across the road from the tents, where we cook and eat and hang out in the evenings, is quite small and tends toward warm and frowsty. Doing anything in the kitchen involves complicated folk-dance style backing, bowing, and turning. We manage to get our breakfasts and make lunches with reasonable grace. As well as the tiny kitchen with two functioning burners on the stove, cold running water in the sink and a full-sized fridge, there is a small vile bathroom with another full-sized fridge; a large room full of Dick’s computer and printer where I can download my camera chips and the ‘lab’ stuff (places and things to clean and work on and catalogue finds); a smallish living/dining room; a wonderful porch; and the frightening back room, full of broken furniture from other parts of the house. The walls are not panelled but have a certain style from the mirror-like moisture barrier. The wires are exposed in the lack of ceiling, but the electricity seems safe. In the early morning, whoever is up first plugs in the coffee machine. The mice were here in a strength that has earned them lasting respect, and a dispossessed red squirrel keeps trying to get back inside. Across the road, we have 16 tents crammed into three campsites, and you can hear people breathing. Not a good setting for hanky-panky, of which none appears to be going on anyway. Sometimes there are other campers, but fortunately not many and they are generally quiet. Generally.

Now it's lunch and we are huddling under a tarp even though it's sunny right here. There is a fine thunderstorm making its way across the valley. A big, isolated mountain protects the site from some of the weather. The thunder sounds like dumpsters being emptied pretty close. My raingear, along with Dawn's, is a stiff 500 yards uphill from here.

And it would have relatively okay to have been soaked, to have gained a cooler climate; it wasn't a terribly hot day, high 80's, but it was terribly humid. As it happened, the storm petered out or went elsewhere and the stifling air stayed in place for the rest of the day. Dick and all the newbies spent 3/4 of the day learning to do paperwork, shaded under the tarp. Dawn and the 7 experienced people toiled up on the hill



and dug shovel test pits and felt sick. It caused some ill feeling, looking down at the paperworkers having a shaded time below. I drank about 4 liters of water today. There was a very occasional breeze, which was miraculous when it came through, and the view into the Connecticut River flood plain was another compensation. We can see fields, hedgerows and loops of the river, with a couple of ranges of mountains or hills. It looks almost like England. We know there was a Paleo presence about halfway down to the river; if you were farther up the hill watching the caribou migration, it must have been stunning.


Catelyn pulls the tape tight as we lay out grid lines for the test pits


Dawn drops a point down, setting the northeast corner of a future pit
Unfortunately so far we haven't found anything except trash the farmers tilled in. The soil on this hillside is deep and looks rich and well-drained. Nathaniel, a very easy-on-the-eyes college grad with serious botany credits, says the flora are typical of lousy well-drained soil. There are drifts of tiny white flowers (bedstraw) dotted with purple vetch and daisies and buttercups and a weird yellow thing I believe Nathaniel called RattlePods. (It was Yellow-Rattle, actually.)
Right now I am still very happy to have enjoyed taking a shower and I am trying to stay awake until dinner.


Dinner was tasty (Dick and Mimi made black beans, Italian sausage, and rice, with salad), but largely memorable for incidents that took place while we were lining up for it. So there I was, in the final third of the line, when screams broke out behind me. The snake arrived at my part of the line and headed under the fridge. I caught it, but definitely it was the proximal third of the snake and the distal two-thirds were under the fridge, determined not to be pulled out. I let it go amid general murmurs that it was surely wrapped around the entrails of the fridge and would be hiding there for awhile. These murmurs had scarcely died away when fresh screams broke out in the cabin's front room. "It's gone into the walls!" Various of us suggested that it was probably eating mice, but the phobics did not care. Peace reigned for a few minutes, and then the snake came out and coiled on the baseboard. It was about a two-foot garter snake, just less than an inch in diameter at the thickest. Perfectly nice snake. Monica, the designated dishwasher, shrieked from the porch that she would NOT come into the house. Dick muttered that she ought not to weasel out of washing the dishes just because she was phobic, and I picked up the poor snake and took it outside. Dick took a few pictures; I wanted to take my shirt off and be a Cretan priestess, but Dick said I would need two snakes to play that game. Mimi and I let it go into the backyard, hoping it would not come back until Monica finished the dishes. (It has, but only Barbara saw it and she's cool with it.)


It stuck its tongue out at me first.